Written in my skin
by Quarto
Summary: In a world in which your soulmate's first words to you are marked on your skin, it's... frustrating to get a heaping helping of condescension and unwanted careers counseling on yours. Scenes from the life of Molly Hooper, pathologist extraordinaire, cat lover, and soulmate to someone who has managed to irritate her even before they've met.


Margaret Antonia Hooper was born at two twenty-five in the morning on the fifth of May, 1979. At two twenty in the morning on the fifth of May, 1994, she sat, by herself, in her bedroom, waiting to see if the words would appear on her wrist. More exhibitionist types would sometimes do this at their birthday parties, surrounded by their friends. But Molly always liked to have her privacy, and so her family were asleep in their own rooms and she was alone.

And she was _fluttering_. Fourteen is a dreamy age, and Molly had been secretly sneaking dozens of paperback romance novels. There was always a scene at the beginning where the young heroines would get tantalizing poetical scraps in elegant script that would lead them on a wonderful adventure until they found their dark, broody, and extremely well endowed heroes… who would finally, finally say the words that they'd been waiting to hear.

Not that Molly, as yet, had any idea of exactly what dimensions constituted "well-endowed." She wasn't much good with boys and her four overprotective older brothers had kept the few contenders at bay.

Just on schedule, the words appeared, seeming to rise like smoke on the pale skin of her wrist. Molly grinned, at first, but the grin faded as the words really just… kept on appearing.

When they'd finished, Molly sat for a while. Then she crept downstairs to the big dictionary in the living room and looked up the word "pathologist."

It didn't sound _bad_ , really… her grades and scientific aptitude already had her teachers pushing her to consider a career in medicine… but she wasn't quite sure how to feel about having it laid out like this. The future's less exciting when it's already written out for you. _On_ you.

* * *

No one knows just _why_ our soulmarks appear on the wrists. They didn't always. Starting around 1470, however, youths just turning fifteen years old began experiencing the phenomenon. This was followed by a tragic spike in the number of witch burnings, but with time, it gradually became accepted as a normal if not universal part of the maturation process.

Humans being humans, there is, of course, constant speculation. Religious scholars tend to view it as one of the most recent manifestations of their own particular deity, and His wish for humans to be joined together according to His will. Those of a more scientific bent typically attribute it to a latent genetic trait whose expression was triggered by the advent of inexpensive movable type and the subsequent increased literacy rates.

Cynical bastards, who abound among both the religious and the scientific, point out that neither of these stories explain why it doesn't seem to work all that well. Up to twenty percent of people with a soulbond will never meet someone whose first words to them match the ones on their wrist. Soulbonded couples do have lower rates of divorce and higher rates of self-reported marital happiness, but that can't necessarily be extracted from the greater social support for their relationships and the increased stigma surrounding their separation. The children of heterosexual soulpairs suffer from inherited genetic disease at approximately the same rates as children of other couples.

The fact that the vast majority of initial interpersonal interactions are entirely mundane makes the question of "is this the one" much more difficult than it would first appear. At various points in history, it was common to routinely introduce oneself with some unusual phrase in order to simplify the process, but by Molly's time this (at least in England) was thought to be gauche and needy. Thus most people didn't have anything particularly revelatory to go off of when looking for "the one."

Molly's best friend at University, as an example, got "Pleased to meet you, Meena" in an elegant copperplate hand on her wrist. She was embarrassingly giggly upon almost all initial encounters with both men and women for several years, until maturity got the better of her.

* * *

Later that morning, Molly's parents read silently over the text on her arm. It began with "Oh, for God's _sake_ , Lestrade, if you seriously can't see what's going on here it's no wonder this country is going to hell" and then continued on in an unpunctuated screed almost to the crease of her elbow before concluding with " _you_ , new pathologist, screen this man for cytisine poisoning, aka laburnum toxicity as you undoubtedly _didn't_ know, and you will find that this _clearly_ post-mortem stab wound was placed in order to disguise the true cause of death which was _obviously_ at the hands of the sister who is the head of her garden club."

In quite small writing.

Peter, Molly's father, said, "I've never seen one of these with italics before."

Molly's mum, Sharon, always looked on the bright side and said, "Well they sound _very_ clever, dear. Bit wordy, but… and it says 'Lestrade,' so, maybe… French? That's romantic."

Peter snorted and said, "He sounds like a git. Though I suppose you Hooper women do have a weakness for that."

Sharon slapped her husband, not entirely in a friendly way, on the shoulder. " _Pete,_ really. And Molly, it could be a woman and that's _just fine_. Whatever makes you happy will make us happy."

"Shazzer," Peter sighed, "Do we really have to fall all over ourselves to be progressive? It's clearly a bloke, look at the handwriting. And when have you ever met a woman who can get away with being such an arsehole? But who cares? What do _you_ think of him, Molls? That's what matters."

Under the combined attention of both parents Molly shrugged a nonchalant teenaged shrug, rolled her eyes, and said "Whatever. Guess I'm going to be a _pathologist_."

Her mum hugged her and said, "We always knew you were so smart you'd do brilliantly. And now you're really growing up." Then she sniffled, and Molly had to roll her eyes again.

"D'you want to go down and do presents, love? I'll make omelets," Sharon said, blowing her nose on a tissue she pulled from her sleeve.

"I guess," Molly muttered. "I'll get dressed."

Her parents left her tiny room, but Peter lingered in the doorway. He hrumphed a bit, and said, "It's just words, Molls. You don't have to try and base your life around them. Look at how it worked out for Ben. You don't have to do or be anything you don't want."

* * *

Benjamin Hooper, just mentioned, is an excellent illustration of the weaknesses of the soulbonding system. The eldest child in the family, he was already seventeen by the time Molly was born. When his own soulbond had appeared, it was elegantly calligraphed but in an entirely unknown language. By asking all of his professors, he determined that it was in Arabic and said, essentially, "Can I start you off with anything to drink?"

Apart from Molly, none of the Hooper children were overburdened with intellect. But they all had an abundance of rock-hard stubbornness, and so Ben gritted his teeth and spent the two subsequent years learning Arabic, which did not in any way come naturally for him. Upon leaving school, he nagged every oil company he could find until he got one to agree to take him on as a roustabout and ship him off to the Middle East. He then spent the next several years, whenever he didn't have to work, going to restaurants and flirting with the local waitstaff.

He finally met Jamila eight years later on a Christmas holiday at home. She had, "Yeah, love, can we get a glass of the house red for my mam, a coke for Molls over there, and, what, five Carlings for the rest of us?" inscribed on her own wrist. This was in a restaurant two blocks from the Hooper house in Brixton and two miles from Jamila's own flat. Jamila had arrived in England approximately three weeks after Ben's fifteenth birthday, and spoke excellent English… but still _thought_ in Arabic.

She was also Moroccan rather than from anywhere in the Middle East, but that's an example of another sort of erroneous thinking and so is neither here nor there.

* * *

Most people who haven't met their "ones" don't show off their soulmarks, for reasons of good taste… and reasons of personal safety, which will become sadly obvious if you think about it for more than thirty seconds. Wide cuffs and bracelets have thus been trendy since the Renaissance. For Molly's first, her mum had picked out the most popular one that the girls at Molly's school were wearing that year. It was a white lace and blue ribbon confection just like the one Kylie Minogue wore in her "What Kind of Fool" video. Later that Sharon went to the shops to buy some of the heavy-duty makeup people used to conceal tattoos, since no bracelet was big enough to hide that long of a rant.

Molly mostly didn't bother with the concealer, then or later. It was England, after all. She could almost always wear long sleeves.

After her birthday breakfast, Molly lay on her back in her bed, staring at her pretty bond cuff and the writing that it mostly failed to cover. She always did her best thinking by herself. And what she thought, that day, was that if she didn't have to do anything she didn't want… well, she should probably go and figure out what it was she _did_ want, shouldn't she? So she took the two romance novels hidden under her bed back to the library and went out to do just that.

It turned out to be easy. Really, the only thing that the soulmark really confirmed about her was that she _could_ eventually be mistaken for a pathologist and that her "one" wasn't likely to turn up until she was old enough for that to happen. Molly did her research and found out that forensic histopathology (which was what the description certainly sounded like) took several years work even after she finished her medical qualifications. If she did. Which she didn't have to.

At fifteen, thirty seems impossibly far away. It really didn't seem to make much sense to worry about it until then. With that realization, Molly Hooper began to be something she couldn't have imagined a week earlier.

She became _popular with boys_.

It turned out that once you stopped being afraid of them and thinking of them as heroes in a romance novel, they became just people… big, noisy people, but nothing alarming. And if you weren't particularly overawed with them (because you knew they weren't your _one_ and so they were basically the same sort of things as your brothers _,_ even if they were clever and handsome and sweet _)_ they would usually pick up on that and just try harder to impress you. Sometimes it would even work.

She dated a fair selection, and eventually lost her virginity to a particularly nice young man who was trying _very_ hard to impress her, though not... _especially_ successfully. It was fun, even if her motivation had been mostly to get it out of the way.

As for the other thing, the career thing, that ended up occupying much more of her brain space. After all, you could mostly ignore boys (and later men) and they'd compensate, but studies required full-time attention. She worked hard and kept her marks up and did well on all her exams. In her upper sixth year, she got accepted to an advanced anatomy class in which the students were allowed to assist in the dissection of a real human cadaver.

There were six of them in that group. Two of them were sick when they were brought into the cad lab. One of them cried over the body- an old woman who had died of cirrhosis secondary to long-term alcoholism. Molly did neither. She positioned herself at the elbow of the foundation year student and watched her first Y-incision… making careful notes all the while.

Nobody she knew would have understood her exhilaration at seeing how humans really worked, for the first time. But on that day, she decided, yes, she _would_ be a doctor, and not a scientist or engineer or solicitor.

Two years later, her tutor at school called her in for a chat and a cup of tea. Doctor Kaur was a middle-aged Sikh woman, and had a blunt but kind fashion of speaking that always reminded Molly of home.

"You are one of our best and brightest students, Molly. You have the ability to succeed in whatever field you wish to pursue," Doctor Kaur began.

Molly beamed, and thanked her.

"But you are also clearly an introvert and overly empathic. The empathy will be beaten out of you in time- that happens to everyone in medicine, and more's the pity. But the introversion will make it difficult for you to be in constant contact with a stream of new patients. You can overcome it, if you wish, but, if you don't wish, well… I wonder if you've ever considered a research specialty? Radiology? Or pathology, you might do very well with that."

Doctor Kaur was puzzled when Molly slowly lowered her forehead to the table in front of her.

"Yes," said Molly, into the table, "Yes, I suppose I _have_ considered going into pathology."

She _liked_ pathology. So why did it feel like a trap?

* * *

Molly did do pathology, in the end. Why not? She finished medical school and her foundation training, aced her entry exams, and started off at the London deanery. But six months before she was due to finish the course, Peter Hooper fell ill. By the time he felt unwell enough to seek treatment, the adenocarcinoma which had started in his pancreas had gleefully colonized his other organs. His doctors did what they could, which was very little for pancreatic cancer… but five months after diagnosis, Pete entered hospice with no expectation of emerging alive.

Barely three weeks after that, the Macmillan nurse said "hours not days" (as opposed to the "days not weeks" they'd been getting before) and all the Hoopers gathered to say goodbye. The room where Peter was going to die was tiny, so the children and grandchildren rotated through, turn by turn. Sharon stayed with him constantly, a fixed point, holding his hand.

Molly took her turn after her brother Jack and his newest daughter, a toddler too young to remember any of this. She sat opposite her mother, looked down at the comatose man lying in the bed, and wished that she'd be able to forget so easily. Her father was more or less unrecognizable. A clinical trial of a new and ineffective form of chemotherapy had stolen his hair, and the disease had made him shed weight like water. In her mind, her father had always been a huge man, but he probably weighed less than Molly did, now.

She was exhausted from overwork and grief, and she stared across at the serene face of her mother, and at the unmarked wrists of her parents, and didn't know what to say.

"I can't believe I never asked this, but… how did you and Dad know?" she asked, abruptly, "When you didn't have the words?"

"Well…" Sharon replied, "I did have the words, you know."

"What?"

"I did! I mean obviously I never met them, but, my words said, "Wait, you're Sharon? Finally!" And then me and your Dad were at lunch, one day… this was back when we were working at the DIY shop… and I had a bit of a pain there, and they just… faded away. While I watched."

This was something that happened, Molly knew, when your "one" died. It wasn't something that people talked about much, but she knew it.

"Anyway, your Dad was there with me and saw what was happening. And he said, "I'm so sorry. But would you like to go out sometime?" He wanted to get in there quickly before anybody else asked me."

Sharon took a tissue from her sleeve and dabbed it at the orange-tinted, toxic tears that were leaking from her husband's eyes. "It's not just about the grand sweeping passion, you know. That doesn't last. It's about loving him even when you think he's a tosser. Every day. For a long life. And I'm proof you can have that even without some bleeding words telling you that you do."

Sharon's face crumpled a bit, but she cleared her throat and looked straight at Molly. "You shouldn't settle for anything less. You're as good a woman as anyone can hope to get and you should make him earn it… whether it's Mr. Opinionated or whether it's somebody else."

Molly smiled, and it felt both horrible and natural to be smiling.

"I don't know. I'm getting older and older and weirder and weirder and… I don't know. Maybe it just won't happen. And that's okay. I'm okay with it."

"Yes, Molly, you're twenty-nine and still single. Clearly your life is over and you should just start collecting cats."

Sharon Hooper never had much patience for self-pity.

"I actually am going to get a cat once I move. I've missed having one."

"Good. And then go out there and get _laid_ -"

" _Jesus_ , Mum," Molly giggled.

"Because believe me, once you're seventy and have tits down to your knees, you will look back on these years with a fond eye and you may as well have something good to remember."

"Oh, my _God_ , Mum, be _quiet_ , everybody is going to hear," Molly was cracking up, until she looked down, and stopped. Because sometime in the ten seconds when they'd been laughing together, her father had also stopped.

Sharon stared at her, waiting for her to do something, until Molly remembered she was a doctor and tucked her fingers under her father's jaw to check his pulse (the radial, at the wrist, hadn't been palpable for hours). There was a slackness, and a silence, that she was all too familiar with. Molly wondered why she had been expecting the high-pitched alarm of an electrocardiograph, because of course they only put one of those on when they are expecting to try to save the patient.

Gently, she took the nasal cannula out of her father's nose and wiped off his face, one last time. Sharon rested her head on her husband's still chest and started to sob.

* * *

Then life went on, as it mostly did. Molly gritted her teeth and finished her education right on schedule, actually taking one of her exams an hour after leaving her father's memorial service. She applied for and got an extremely prestigious position at St. Barts, and settled in, very happily. The work was even more intense than her training, but she loved the freedom to control her own research and follow up on her own interests. Her new boss, Mike Stamford, referred to his employees collectively as "you little shits" but looked after all of them like a mother hen.

It turned out that she really did favor the occasions when she worked for the law. Murder in all its variations made up a fascinating branch of forensic pathology, and Bart's had a long-standing relationship with the Metropolitan Police. Mike was the primary liaison to the Yard for the criminal cases, but seeing that Molly had a knack for the work, he began passing some of them over to her.

She practically had a heart attack when Mike introduced her to Greg Lestrade, a handsome silver-haired detective inspector, on one of those early cases. Molly would find herself staring at him when he would visit the morgue on a case, wondering about her soulmate. Did Greg already know him? Was he another police officer? Was he Greg's age… or maybe even older, given the condescending tone of the text creeping up her wrist?

Then Greg started talking about nothing but his (apparently very lovely) wife every time they met, and Molly realized that he'd misinterpreted her staring as romantic interest in _him_. Because of course he had. Really, low-grade humiliation was basically par for the course.

The stupid bloody text on her arm had convoluted her life in ways she had never expected, and if none of them had actually been _bad_ yet she was still starting to get really hacked off about it. How exactly was she supposed to explain to Greg, "Oh, yeah, just so you know I'm not a huge loser who's obsessed with you but can't manage to actually say anything about it. Not at all! I'm a huge loser pathetically hanging about waiting for my _soulmate_ to turn up. Does this chickenscratch handwriting covering my _entire_ forearm remind you of anyone you know? And if so, how do you think he'd feel about me spending the money to buy some P90X DVDs, because I've _really_ been concerned that my ass is getting a bit saggy here on the wrong side of thirty and he might not be keen on that."

It was ridiculous. _She_ was ridiculous. Her _life_ was ridiculous.

* * *

On a very ordinary Thursday she was prepping for a post-mortem when Greg Lestrade ambled into autopsy room three. He frowned.

"Molly, hi… I thought Mike was doing the Garretson case?"

"The stabbing? He was, but his daughter's school called and she's got stomach flu. And his wife's in France. So I'm taking it," she said.

" _Shit_ ," Greg muttered, then noticing her offended expression, continued, "No, no, sorry, I'm happy to have you handle it. As best I can tell you're really good at your job, it's just… sometimes, at the Met, we employ consultants on some of the more unusual stuff, right?"

"Sure," Molly said, not quite clear on what this had to do with anything.

"Something about this one isn't sitting right with me so I called one of them in, and he's _good_ , but he's also a bit-"

A bit _what_ would remain a mystery for the ages, because at that moment the double doors to the small autopsy bay banged open. Later, Molly would wonder exactly how he'd managed that, since they were on pneumatic hinges specifically so that they _wouldn't_ bang. For the first time, Sherlock Holmes swooped into her life, big black coat fluttering dramatically around him.

He looked at the corpse on the table, and then turned his gaze to Molly, making one searching scan from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes and back again. From most men, this sort of behavior would have been remarkably sexual for the middle of the workday, but instead it just seemed somehow… insulting?

Then he turned away from her and to Greg, opened his mouth and spat, "Oh, for God's _sake_ , Lestrade, if you-" and Molly tuned him out. She didn't need to listen. She knew it all by heart.

 _At least he's good looking_ , she thought, dazedly. And he _was_ , in a horsey, overbred sort of way, though too skinny for his height and with more chins than the average. Tall, very good hair, posh clothes, all perfectly acceptable. Shame he was such an unmitigated dick.

Because _really_ , Molly thought, where the hell did he get off acting like that to a stranger who had never done a thing to offend him? _And_ to Greg! Who was always so gracious to everyone and worked so hard to get justice for the murdered… who had literally called this asshole in and given him a job even when he didn't have to! And how bloody _dare he_ assume that she wouldn't have figured out something was wrong without him snidely telling her what to look for? Molly wasn't an idiot, and she _was_ really good at her job. Even before the corpse was undressed she could tell that there was far too little blood for a perimortem stabbing that hadn't pierced the heart, plus poor Mr. Garretson's lividity and rigor were all wrong for a trauma death. Even if she didn't know… really a ridiculous amount about cytisine poisoning, a true pathological rarity that she wasn't expecting to see more than once in her career… she would certainly have suspected _something_ was up and run additional testing.

Molly realized then that he'd stopped talking and was staring at her, impatiently, waiting for her to jump to his orders. And she knew, finally, what she had been wanting to say to him for _years_.

Greg said, hesitantly, "So, this is Sher-"

And Molly smiled, broadly, stepped up to her soulmate, and said, "You can piss right on off, because you are _not_ my boss, and I do _not_ have to do or be anything I don't want. I'm _free._ "

She punctuated each "not" with a swipe of her finger, and was savagely pleased to see him flinch back despite being a good bit bigger than her. With a final proud toss of her head, she walked out of autopsy room three and strode down the hall.

* * *

Greg poked his head out the door of the autopsy room to watch Molly Hooper stalking away with her determined little walk, ponytail switching behind her. He called out to her, but she just made that Dog Whisperer "Tzzzst!" sound at him and turned the corner out of his sight.

He wondered if he was actually allowed to be in here without a staff member around. And where one found the various Mikes and Mollys of Barts when they _weren't i_ n the autopsy bays, because despite what Sherlock thought it did take quite a lot more than just his deductions to get an arrest warrant issued.

"I admit," he said, "That I _have_ seen people react worse than that to meeting you. But I wouldn't have expected it from her. She's usually really-"

He stopped, then, because in the ten seconds he'd been looking out the door Sherlock had stripped off his daft black coat and his jacket, rolled up one of his sleeves. He was staring, aghast, at his own left wrist. In his right hand was a plain black leather bond cuff.

Greg could feel a grin rising on his face.

"Oh, no. You're _kidding_ ," he said, and fumbled in his pocket for his phone.

* * *

 _Yes,_ Molly exulted, _that'll show him to try and push_ _me_ _around._ She'd gotten her power back after sixteen years of waiting, and it felt _wonderful_.

For at _least_ two minutes. Then a sinking guilty feeling told her that it probably hadn't done him any psychological favors spending his life knowing that his soulmate was going to tell him to piss off. Knowing that she was going to be aggressively condescended to by hers had certainly messed _Molly_ up. And if he was her soulmate and also her occasional colleague, she was definitely going to see him again, except now she'd be on the wrong foot with him forever because she'd probably hurt his feelings and made _herself_ the one in the wrong. _And_ he really had been quite good-looking and she might actually have been impressed by his acute reasoning if it hadn't been hanging over her head for a decade and a half.

She'd completely screwed that up, hadn't she? Molly waved off a candystriper who was concerned that she was banging her head against the wall.

She had confirmation of the fact she was a screw-up the next morning, when she came into the lab only to find him sitting at _her_ desk. He ignored her stammering apologies and interrupted with, "Sherlock Holmes. You're Molly Hooper. I _quite_ agree with you on the nonsensical and offensive nature of soulmarks, and have no intention of pursuing any form of relationship other than the professional with you, so we can proceed with that _happily_ behind us."

"Um," Molly said.

"Now, then," Sherlock continued, taking a sheaf of official-looking papers out of the inside pocket of his jacket and passing them over to her, "I'm allowed to be here and do what I like."

Molly looked down at the papers and frowned.

"Is that really the Secretary of Health's signature?"

"Possibly," he replied, tenting his fingers in front of his face, "In any case, I need a body, and the experiment I'm planning arguably counts as mutilating a corpse. Have you got anything suitable?"

She _did_ , oddly enough. Dave Parker had been the head of Barts' pathology service until his retirement two years prior. He'd requested that he be shipped to the body farm in Wales, but when Mike had inquired he'd found they didn't need anything just at the moment, and so the body was somewhat at loose ends. But - what the hell was he planning to do?

Sherlock noticed her hesitation, and he smiled, sweetly, at her and said, "Please, Molly. For _science_."

Horse-faced git or not, he was ridiculously attractive when he smiled.

She was _doomed_.

* * *

Ever since Sam Bradstreet (soulmark: "Hallo, blondie, where'd you come from?") was a boy, he'd wanted to be a detective. And although he had much more legitimate reasons that he told people when asked, the true reason was Sherlock Holmes, who was his hero. He'd devoured every single one of John Watson's stories, and plodded through every excruciating monograph on the identification of tobacco ashes or animal hairs on thescienceofdeduction. co. uk. When he'd got old enough, he studied criminal justice at university and the only jobs he'd ever applied for were at Scotland Yard. The very instant he'd gotten his two years in uniform he took the detective exam and was thrilled when he was selected as a trainee constable in SCD 1.

All of the people he'd read about in the stories were there, albeit older and doing much more paperwork than he'd imagined. He'd asked, subtly, if his idol ever came around, but was told, "Not that often, and when he does you'll be lucky if you're out of the way."

They were right. The day that he was the first man on the scene at a terrible murder in Peckham, he found this out the hard way. After he'd called for backup, he stood carefully off to one side and tried not to be sick while the scene team began taking photographs. And then Sherlock Holmes ducked under the yellow crime scene tape, followed closely by DI Donovan.

He looked just like he did in his pictures, tall and dark and keen eyed. Within approximately thirty seconds, those keen eyes were focused on Sam, and the great detective snapped to Donovan, "You need to sack size nine-and-a-half patrol boots over there. He's tracked mud and blood all over the crime scene. I can make nothing of this."

Sam's jaw dropped, and he tried to stammer out, "I- I was trying to see if I could help him-"

" _Help_. Him? His _head's_ practically off. Exactly what did you believe you could do for him with your three days of mandated paramedic training? Really, Sally, the one who couldn't read his own reports without moving his lips was preferable to this. At least he wasn't infected with delusions of competence."

DI Donovan had then told him in a low voice to head back to the station. Sam had done this, and was now sitting in a chair outside the Chief Inspector's office, helmet in lap, waiting to be sacked and trying hard not to cry.

Lestrade bellowed through the closed door "Bradstreet, you out there? Get in."

Sam had never been in this office before. It would probably have been very impressive if it wasn't entirely filled with file boxes and unsorted paperwork. The chief inspector was frazzled-looking, and in the middle of typing something into one of three laptop computers.

"Heard there was a bit of an incident."

"Yes, sir, and I want to just apologize but I did really only want-"

Lestrade scratched his head and interrupted with, "Sit down. I want to show you what happened when Sherlock Holmes met his wife."

"I- I didn't know he had a wife."

"Yeah, she's a civilian and not everybody's as big a fan of his as you are, so we keep it quiet. But he does."

With that he turned one of the laptops around so that Sam could see it, and clicked "play" on a video player. The man on the grainy, shaky video was younger, thinner, and less dangerous-looking than the man Sam had met in Peckham. He was also apparently mid-breakdown, and speaking in a rapid, high voice, he said, "That was _her!"_

"Looks like." Lestrade was clearly the one taking the video, and his Cockney-accented voice on the audio track was crackling with suppressed laughter.

"Five feet three inches tall brown hair brown eyes attractive nose seventeen freckles and one cherry angioma poppyseed bagel for breakfast mild dental malocclusion from extended childhood thumb-sucking-" Sherlock said in a high-speed monotone.

"Yeah, so when you describe her to a stranger don't do it that way, but-"

" _Breasts!_ "

"Yep, standard equipment-"

"And she _hates_ me!"

"She doesn't hate you, she doesn't even know you. What you need to do, right, is go after her, say you're sorry, ask her for coffee or dinner or something. You'll work it out. You're _soulm-_ "

"Yes! Right!" Sherlock barked, "Or wait, no!"

He straightened up and glared at the lens of the camera, "Why do _I_ have to apologize? _She's_ the one who was impolite."

"Well, from over here you _both_ seem like a pair of twerps, but those have to be difficult soulmarks to grow up with so-"

"In fact," the young detective said, buttoning up his cuff and sneering, slightly, "This is more or less ideal. I've gotten it out of the way, and now I can focus simply on the work, without being burdened by _sentiment."_

"Oh. Oh, mate," Lestrade lowered his mobile and the image on the computer screen showed a battered linoleum floor, "You know how sometimes you talk yourself into thinking it's a really great idea to go take a whole lot of cocaine? This, right here? _This_ is another example of you working against your own best interest. You'll _like_ Molly-"

"Molly?"

"Yeah. Molly Hooper."

"I don't need to _like_ her. She needs to be useful to me. That is _all_ I require."

There was a sound of a slamming door, and Lestrade's voice muttering, "Shit. I'll just solve this murder without any help, then, shall I?"

The video ended. Lestrade leaned back in his chair and commented, "So after that he hung around her for eight years driving off every other man she might have been interested in until he finally got over himself enough to ask her out. Do you know why I showed you this?"

"No, sir."

"Because Sherlock's a very good man, who is also an abrasive, domineering asshole. He forgets, sometimes, that other people have other priorities than solving crimes. Like you. Your _first_ job is protecting the public, which includes trying to save them when they're stabbed, if there's any possibility of that. You did nothing wrong today."

"Oh," said Sam, dazedly.

"Sally's pinched his ear about it so he's probably not going to kick up a fuss next time he sees you. Though if he does I do keep a small collection of videos like this on hand if you need them, after. But he's _never_ going to apologize. There's maybe three people who can make him do that and I need to save them up for emergencies."

"That's all right, sir, thank you."

Lestrade stood up, and Sam jumped to his feet at the same time. He was kindly but firmly steered out the door of the office by the Chief Inspector's large hand on his shoulder. Lestrade bellowed to the bullpen at large "Bradstreet's just popped his cherry, someone get him a drink!"

Over the sound of cheering, Lestrade said, "A lot of us spend our lives revolving around Sherlock Holmes. But there's worse ways to live."


End file.
